The Apple Car - A $10 Billion Failure

this video was brought to you by incog Hello, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion, it was the fall of 2015 and Johnny I, Apple's chief designer, couldn't contain his excitement. He wants to show Apple CEO Tim Cook a concept he had been working on. IV leads Tim Cook to a minivan and tells him to identify it. It was no ordinary minivan, although it has no steering wheel and the car is completely autonomous. The interior looks fantastic with wood and leather upholstery. John asked Tim Cook to give him an order. Siri, who was actually a human voice actress standing a few feet away, pretended to be the voice assistant.

Tim was supposed to use his imagination and fill in the blanks. Johnny. I even asked Siri for, quote, information about a restaurant down the street. side of the road and the actress responded accordingly, it sounds like a comedy sketch, but according to The Verge, this was a real set of events in the perception of what would become Apple's unfortunate car with an initial demonstration like that , one might think it is. It's no surprise that 10

billion

later the project failed, but is this too cynical a take? Surely Apple must have seen something to want to jump into the automotive business.

In this episode we will see why Apple decided to make a car. why they invested

billion

s into the project and how it ultimately ended up failing, so fasten your seatbelts as we go on a journey to find out why Apple's car never made it to the finish line. You are watching T Fusion TV. Apple seems to be pulling the plug. its plans to build electric cars according to a Bloomberg report. Its report says the tech giant is closing its electric vehicle team called Special Projects Group, which employs thousands of workers. Bloomberg says the team had difficulty even fitting the plans into Apple's core business. electronics and online services and questions remain about where Apple would manufacture the vehicles.

The report says the move signals the end of Apple's secret effort to rival Tesla's EV Juggernaut Before we get started, let's get one thing out of the way. Apple has never formally acknowledged the existence of a car project and as such have not announced its cancellation, but despite this, there were clear signs that the company was dabbling in the automotive industry, if you can believe it, since 2000. As of 2022, Apple has applied for 248 automobile-related patents. It's their second-largest category after communication and navigation. Over the years, they've also hired a group of automotive engineers to work in a top-secret lab in Silicon Valley, but perhaps the most obvious evidence comes from the Department of Vehicles.

Motorized from California, where Apple has registered. drivers and vehicles to test it was a serious business and Elon Musk even offered to sell Tesla to Apple in 2017 and this was during the Model 3 production hell, but Tim Cook turned his back on Musk, so it is clear that Apple had some car-related projects. which they have been working on for a few years, but some of you might be thinking that Steve Jobs would not have tolerated such Tom Foolery but you would be wrong according to a Bloomberg interview Tony Fidel, who oversaw the iPod project, spoke to Steve Jobs. a few times about Apple making a car and the works considered the idea quote we had a couple of walks and this was in 2008 about if we built a car, what would we build, what would be a dashboard, what would the seats be, how would the fuel be fed. or feed it, what can Apple do for the automobile market?

If you think about a car, what is a car? A car has batteries, it has a computer, it has a motor and it has a mechanical structure, if you look at an iPhone, it has all the same things if it has a motor, so if you try to say it and zoom in and say, "Oh my God, I could make a car with those same components", there is some truth in that, although it is clear that this did not top the list of jobs. Of priorities, this interaction indicates that Apple was thinking about making a car 16 years ago;

However, it wasn't until 2015 that the first reports of Apple making a car really gained traction. We'll talk about that shortly, but first it's important to understand why the mid-20s was such an interesting time for Apple to enter the scene. By then, Tesla had laid the groundwork to demonstrate that EVS could be a viable product. Electric vehicle sales, particularly in the United States, were rising and then newcomer Rivan was already in the development phase, so what was so compelling about the automotive space that Apple wanted to enter? I would love to have a concrete answer, but as far as I know outside of Apple, no one knows for sure, but we can have some educated guesses.

Apple at the time was already one of the most valuable companies in the world and they had money to spend, so Apple may have wanted to revolutionize The Humble car and challenge the status quo, but the automotive industry is over 100 years old and electric vehicle companies were already doing much of the little innovation available. How much could a car really be reinvented at this stage? There has to be a deeper reason. The most logical reason is that Apple simply wanted to play its usual game of strict software and hardware. integration Apple CarPlay has been around since 2014, so integrating it into an Apple car could provide the tightest integration of all, according to CNBC.

Apple has toyed with the idea of ​​in-car dashboard payments, payments for fuel, takeout, and electric vehicle charging stations, for example. They go on to say that if cars were fully autonomous, billions of hours of mass transit per year would be freed up for people to use Apple apps in their cars and this would mean big revenue for Apple, but the best idea of ​​the motivations behind the extent. comes from Tim Cook in a 2017 interview, he told the New York Times that Apple was focused on autonomous systems and that self-driving cars were essentially a robot. He also said that we love to integrate software and hardware services and find the intersection points of them because I think that's where the magic happens and that's what we love to do and we love to own the core technology that exists, which sketches and Leaked reports point to autonomous driving without a steering wheel, passengers sitting opposite each other, a futuristic table in the middle and a perfect assistant, obviously in the state in which the sisters in this would have been very far away anyway, one of the The first official stories to emerge about the Apple car was from CBS in 2015, in which they tracked a self-driving Dodge Caravan on the streets of San Francisco and concluded that it was leased by Apple.

That year there were numerous sightings of a similar car. in New York too and you can see some interesting comments in the YouTube comments section, people were already alluding to an Apple Car 9 years ago shortly after reports indicated that Apple took a lot of steps to make the Apple Car project a reality, too Known as Titan, according to the Wall Street Journal, in February 2015, a large team of about a thousand people was led by former Ford engineer Steve Zesi. Apple was also looking at contract manufacturers like BMW, Mercedes, Nissan, Byd, McLaren and Volkswagen, none of these efforts materialized, but it seems that even before Apple could start the ignition, there were problems under the hood, just a year after all the rumors and reports of some shocking news.

Bankrupt Zesi was already gone by the end of 2016. Apple had laid off at least a dozen employees and were second-guessing the entire project. Zesi was replaced by former Apple hardware engineer Bob Mansfield, who in turn hired a former Blackberry executive to focus on autonomous driving with such lack of management and leadership changes, employees involved in the project already were confused in 2018, both workers and Leadership saw even more changes and by the end of the year, The Washington Post reported that around 5,000 employees were working directly or indirectly on Project Titan. and then

apple

went crazy, they ramped up testing in california and at one point they had more vehicles registered than uber and whmo combined and during this period

apple

bought a self driving startup.ai stole a contracted electric motorcycle startup and then lost or fired several auto executives from established companies like Tesla and arrested employees for allegedly stealing and sharing trade secrets with China.

It was a wild ride, but in 2022 the lack of direction was becoming palpable. Apple software chief Craig Federi had significant doubts about the project. Reports also suggest that the project was the butt of jokes by employees who were not directly involved in it, and to make matters worse, there was an incident in early 2012 in which an Apple test vehicle came dangerously close. about to collide with a runner, everything seemed lost, but suddenly, at the end. In 2023, it seemed like Apple was finally getting its act together, they decided to scale back their original Ambitions, no more self-driving capabilities, instead it will be a sub-$100,000 standard car, yes it's basically a reduction of what Apple planned to do, so did they. rethink what that product looks like, sources say they want to make something that has a lower level of autonomy, think level two, something more like Tesla's current capabilities with Autopilot, so it turns out that autonomous driving it is really very difficult with almost $10 billion The project had been reduced, but what finally killed it and why it failed we will find out after a short word from the sponsor today, so let's hope this does not happen in the information system and your car entertainment, but we've all had those scam phones. calls texts and fishes emails, but have you ever wondered why it happens?

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One reason could be the departure of DJ Navonne. hardware executive who left Apple to join Rivan in January 2024, reports suggest that he was one of the key drivers of the project and his departure could have been very damaging. Another reason is that autonomous driving turned out to be too difficult, but the most cited reason was that on February 27, 20124 there was an internal announcement at Apple saying that the project was canceled, but the key to this is that staff will be moved to the Department of Apple AI, many Project Titan employees will be moved to support machine learning and other initiatives end of quote, it is clear that Apple has changed its focus from the automobile to AI, yes, they had ripped off the band-aid.

I mean, it was clear that this was investing a lot of money after bad investors wanted to see them focus entirely on AI, so I think this was something that has been a painful period in terms of starts and stops in electric vehicle initiatives, but I think the writing was the wall, the smart move for Cook and Cerino was to focus entirely on AI and I think that's a step forward and puts this chapter in the past, if you've seen my video from a few weeks ago you'll know that Apple is working hard behind the scenes to try to jump into the AI ​​space, they have been acquiring a staggering number of AI companies and they are just waiting.

For the perfect time to strike in the context of the AI ​​floodgates opening with an open AI pun, it's clear that Apple had to do something, so, with a lack of clear direction and a proper leadership, it seemed that Apple's car project was doomed to

failure

. Apple was probably too ambitious from the beginning in 2015, achieving a fully autonomous vehicle is almost impossible to achieve and that also applies to 2024. Remember that conversation between Tony Fidel and Steve Jobs that I mentioned earlier in the video every time they talked about the cars that Steve would entertain. theidea, but it said this is what I would normally answer with a quote at the end.

It was always like we were so busy and so limited. It would be great if we could do it, but we can't end the appointment. It seems that is still the case for Apple with so many projects underway with so many advancements in so many areas. Apple simply has its hands in the past, there were plans for a TV and a camera, but they also did not see the light of day after $10 billion. and 10 years behind the project is definitely not short, but it's definitely too late for Apple, but that being said, Apple may still have the last laugh according to CNBC. 98% of new cars in the United States have Apple CarPlay, a move they call a Trojan horse for the auto industry and we'll leave it at that so that's the story of the Apple car.

I want to thank you very much for watching the whole process. My name is toogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion and I'm going to do it. See you soon for the next episode Greetings guys, have a good time. I just want to merge, it's a new way of thinking.